The world’s Amphibians are in the grips of the worst extinction crisis this planet has seen since the dinosaurs were wiped out. It's a catastrophe that will reverberate through the entire web of life yet it fails to grab headlines like pandas or polar bears. This blog is dedicated to the ugly, the freakish and the unloved animals that are perilously ignored thanks to the tyranny of cute.

February 2010

02/12/2010

Fear and loathing in Peru. Me and the super psychedelic
Phyllomedusa bicolor, who’s skin contains more mind-altering substances than
the late Hunter S Thompson’s bathroom cabinet. I love this frog but resisted kissing him for fear of losing what's left of my marbles.

My amphibian adventure is about to get really interesting.
I’m on a fast train to frog central in the jungles of Peru. OK not a fast
train, but three flights and a rather slow boat ride. Anyway, I’m swapping the
glamour of Rio de Janeiro for a month of mud and mosquitoes in the middle of
nowhere. It’s time to go native with the frogs.

Welcome to the wild west. My fellow passengers on the
river bus are miners, mostly illegal, who come down from the Andes to pan for
gold.

My last gasp of civilisation is the jungle town of Puerto
Maldonado near the border with Bolivia. From here it’s a 10-hour boat ride up
the Madre de Dios river to my final destination, the CICRA Los Amigos
biological research station deep in the heart of the Amazon basin. A remote
academic island in a vast green sea, that just happens to be the most
bio-diverse jungle on the planet. For the next month I’m going to live with a
dozen or so field scientists exploring this rainforest and documenting their
work as CICRA’s artist in residence. I can’t believe my luck.

CICRA is the Hilton of field stations with 5 star
facilities - my own solar powered hut comes complete with its very own
gecko family to keep the mossies at bay.

There is also the distinct possibility that a month in the
jungle with a limited cast, no phone and an antique internet connection will
send me completely mad. I arrive at dinnertime and am almost immediately warned
of how intense it can get here. It feels a
bit like being dropped into a reality TV show - Big Brother crossed with I’m a
Celebrity featuring a cast of zoologists. And millions of biting insects.
Here’s hoping I don’t get voted out in the first week or forced to eat witchety
grubs to save my career.

CICRA = frog geek heaven, the ID chart for the local amphibians lists almost 100 species

But the frogs will keep me sane…as long as I don’t start
licking them. The jungle here harbours an amphibian pharmacopoeia stocked with
a kaleidoscope of candy coloured frogs whose skins secrete a heady cocktail of
chemicals. Amphibian’s skin is their Achilles heal – exceedingly delicate, it
has to be permeable enough for them to use as a second lung, and therefore
prone to infection (just look at the havoc caused by the skin fungus Chytrid). The toxins it produces are the product of millions
of years of evolution and a never-ending chemical war waged against a battery
of wannabe parasites.

As a result my first Peruvian
frog-hunt uncovers enough drugs to get me arrested in Kansas (as this video shows).

Amongst the top frogs in the chemical war stakes are the
fantastic Phyllomedusa family, also
known as Monkey frogs. This is because they live high up in the trees and not
because they are the product of some warped hybridisation experiment (for those that were disturbed the first time, I do
apologise for including that link again but I couldn’t resist it).

The biggest of the bunch,Phyllomedusa bicolor synthesises an arsenal of chemicals capable of
knocking out Pete Docherty, which are secreted in a milky fluid to protect the
frog from snakes. These include a long list of peptides such as dermorphin - a
painkiller over 30 times stronger than morphine at the cerebral level but
bioactive and therefore non-addictive.

The Matses equivalent of popping to the chemist is to
subject the monkey frog to a form of medieval torture in order to get it to produce its toxic sweat

The local Matses Indians have long used the
giant monkey frog’s sweat in various rituals and cures. Now pharmaceutical
companies have cottoned on and are investigating the use of these peptides as
treatments for a range of illnesses from Alzheimer's to brain cancer. When these
drugs go on sale I think the pharma companies should donate a proportion of
sales to saving the frogs that invented the chemicals (and also to the
Amazonian tribal people who discovered their uses first). They could consider
it as an investment to protect this biomedical treasure trovethat’s still largely waiting to be discovered,
before it’s wiped out.

The first frog I catch in Peru is the utterly alien
Phyllomedusa camba, I am so happy I could pop.

I have always wanted to see a monkey frog in the wild and am
ecstatic to discover three different species on my first foray into the forest.
They are even more spectacular in the flesh – totally otherworldly creatures
that advertise their trippy nature with even trippier looks. If William Burrough's designed frogs they would look like these guys with their lurid green waxy skins, go-faster stripes down their side and super puddy fingers. These frogs really
blow my mind, without even having to lick them.